The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment. In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing.

Since the Steam client isn’t much without a game, we’re also porting L4D2 to Ubuntu. This tests the game-related features of the Steam client, in addition to L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu. Over the last few months, excellent progress has been made on several fronts and it now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. We’re working hard to improve the performance and have made good progress (more on that in a future post). Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows.

Games on Linux (Desktop) make about as much sense as games on OSX... and I've had an iMac for my non-gaming needs since 2007. I run zero games on it.

As mobile games get more robust (Android and IOS), an emulator that properly adjusts for screen resolution, keyboard, and mouse makes more sense for gaming on the non-windows platforms, rather than full blown *nix desktop games. There really just isn't the support, nor the momentum for them.